


The Archer With The Eyes of a Hawk: Minific Collection

by Lia



Series: The Archer with the Eyes of a Hawk [4]
Category: Animorphs, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Animorphs Canon Level Violence mentioned, Clint Barton was Tobias, Crossover, Gen, Minific collection, TW: Taxxons, Tumblr Prompts, aka tw: alien cannibalism, extended character meta
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-15
Updated: 2013-10-22
Packaged: 2017-12-29 11:11:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1004737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lia/pseuds/Lia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time I wrote a crossover between Animorphs and The Avengers. Clint Barton was once Tobias. These are minifics within that universe, prompted by people in my tumblr askbox. This really will NOT make sense if you haven't read the other works in this series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Namesake: Clintobias and Toby

**Author's Note:**

> A huge thank you to everyone who follows me on tumblr and helps me with prompts and discussions and squees about this series. You guys rock! My tumblr is chromatographic.tumblr.com and most things relevant to this universe can be found here: http://chromatographic.tumblr.com/tagged/anivengers 
> 
> If you do check out my tumblr, be warned that I talk about Animorphs a lot. 
> 
> I AM still working on the next actual story in this series, but am struggling with a lot of life issues, especially my major depression and anxiety issues, so it's slow going.
> 
> These shorts will be updated on an "as I feel like it" basis, probably.
> 
> These are entirely unbeta'd and any mistakes I make regarding grammar/spelling/canon things are my own.

Clint takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. It's been awhile since he's been to California, and he doesn't really want to be back. But, well, some things are worth it.

The slow, creeping terror that defined his teenage years clamps down at him as soon as he steps off of the Quinjet and smells the air. California all right, even if it’s the damp redwood forest and not the sharp city. Even if he’d been a hawk for most of it, the smell of the region always reminds him of battle and blood and death, to a degree he's never seen when working with SHIELD.

He lived with this fear for almost a decade, though. He could do it again for a few days.

Clint walks away from the helipad flanking Fury, who’s here for the annual diplomatic meeting with the leaders of the Hork Bajir colony, to keep everyone in touch.

The original Valley was compromised at the end of the War, but Redwoods are the best trees on Earth for the Hork-Bajir, and conservation status is as good a reason as any to keep the valley closed to tourists and laypeople. There’s only one road in and out, three human buildings, and the rarely-used helipad. The road's technically been closed for years though, nominally due to a landslide.

It’s not a very long meeting, but he sits in on it anyway, running security and keeping an ear out - there’s nothing he needs to say, actually, ten years or so have made the humans and Hork Bajir alike accustomed to another's presence and quirks of management. It’s clear that everyone is on the same page before they even start, which is a nice change from most meetings he sees.

The human contingent is technically led by Fury, but actually led by a combination of a Dr. Gia Campelli - a dark skinned woman dressed in bright colors and large jewelry, who is a sociologist or something - and a blonde white woman who lives in the area, a lawyer that Clint avoids even thinking about. He never meets any of their eyes, not that he makes a point about it.

The Hork-Bajir contingent is matched to the humans, but is actually, always, led by the Seer.

Toby.

He knows she knows it's him, even if no one outside of Fury is technically supposed to know here. Toby always knows.

He goes up to her, afterwards, privately, and she walks up to him, and gives him a true Hork-Bajir smile.

“Namesake,” they say to each other, and embrace.

It turns out that she has three children now, and is hopeful for a fourth. The Hork-Bajir population has grown fairly rapidly, but wasn’t big in the first place. She’s been busy trying to negotiate new territory for them, though, as in a few years the Valley might well be bursting at the seams.

She’s scared about what will happen if she dies, and there is no Seer. She’s scared that the humans will take her people’s rights away. But she’s determined and hopeful, she genuinely likes the humans working with them and thinks that they are on her people’s side. She’s offered Fury assistance, should he need it, defending Earth. It’s their planet, too, now.

They talk, and talk, late into the night, at a campfire whose wood was all stripped of bark beforehand, among the damp redwood forest, and he finally doesn’t smell blood any longer.

“It’s not easy, fighting for our Freedom. But we have it. And I will keep fighting for it, until my death,” Toby says, in her easy way of making grand declarations.

“Yeah,” Clint smiles back at her. “Me too.”


	2. Warrior

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clintobias and Tony Stark have a conversation. Both come out of it with new views on their world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no idea why this particular short wound up in first person POV. As with all these stories, this is a cleaned up version of what was previously posted on my tumblr.
> 
> I don't know what I'm doing, in case that wasn't clear before. I really don't.

“So,” Tony slumped down beside me, handing me a stiff drink. It’s probably obscenely expensive, whatever it is, but I recognize it as something of his I’ve had before and liked. “Your dad was an alien and you met him only on the day he died. That kinda sucks.”

 

I swallowed a laugh - it would have been bitter and more than a little hysterical and really, just not the type of impression Hawkeye likes to give to the world. I’d rather be given space for being a brooding emotionless badass than for being crazy and broken, you know?

 

“Yeah,” I said instead, “It really does.”

 

“I don’t like talking about my own Dad, lonely childhood genius and all that jazz, but did you ever find out more about him?”

 

I take a slow sip of - I think it’s brandy? Whatever. - and think about what Tony Stark is really asking me.

 

“Tony. Is this some sort of bribe to glean whatever details of Andalite technology you can from me?”

 

A flash a guilt.

 

“Well, yeah, maybe a little bit? I mean there’s the files but you were there, you touched things, and there’s nothing like the hands on experience.”

 

“Well, the story of how I met my father is: His fighter landed in front of the five of us. He stepped out, seriously injured, talked to us, told us about the Yeerks. He gave us the morphing power and talked to me, and I held his hand. He pressed his hand to my face in what I later would realize was basically a kiss before making us all run away. Then Visser Three landed, morphed a monster, and ate him alive.”

 

“Oh.”

 

I took another sip. Eh, whatever the reason, Tony had asked to know this.

 

“I didn’t even know he was my father then. We didn’t find that out until a lot later. And then, later, we found something at the crash site. A copy of his _hirac delest_. Basically his… I don’t know, Important Life Story. His memories, sent to his ship’s computer. Prince Elfangor’s last words to the universe.”

 

“Huh. My Dad left SHIELD a bunch of crap that they decided to give me when I was dying of palladium poisoning.”

 

“What is this, a contest?” I said, really not sure why Tony was even here right now. Talking to me and not to Pepper or Mar or Steve or anyone else.

 

“No! Or, maybe? I didn’t mean it to be, but I’m probably subconsciously turning it into one.” Tony gestured a bit ostentatiously. “I’m a jerk like that sometimes.”

 

“Well… if you looking to the winner of the horrible life contest, I think know who wins.”

 

“Really?” Tony sounded like he had tried to come off as bored but was actually instantly curious.

 

“Yeah, the story was in Elfangor’s story. He was an _aristh_ , an Andalite cadet, with one other cadet on his ship, a guy named Arbron,” I took a big sip of the brandy. “Did you get to any of the stuff about Taxxons yet?”

 

“Giant centipedes, right?” Tony’s brow furrowed a bit. “I mean, they didn’t seem terribly dangerous or interesting, I admit to kind of skimming that section a bit.”

 

“Yeah, I mean, they were pretty easy to kill, but they were also not fun to fight. Everyone I’ve met who's seen them has been scared of them. And not just because they’re giant bugs or something. It took me awhile to pin it down in my head, but the true fear of Taxxons doesn’t lie in the threat they pose, but in what they are. Their very existence is terrifying.”

 

Tony’s brow wrinkled a bit at that. “What do you mean?”

 

“Some quirk of their genetics and environment means they have a huge problem: They’re always hungry. Always. Never ending, eternally voracious. I’ve been starving before, and it’s nothing compared to the hunger I felt in Taxxon morph. If you’re in a swarm of Taxxons? You want to hit one to rip it open, and then get the hell out of there, because what happens is a feeding frenzy. They will eat anything they can. Once… Once Ax cut a Taxxon in half. The rest of us were in morph and didn’t see. But he told us it wasn’t a threat any longer because one half was eating the other.”

 

“Jesus Christ.” Tony was pale. That’s pretty much the right reaction to a Taxxon.

 

“Yeah. The Yeerks came to their world and basically said ‘Here, take a slug in your brain and we’ll help you control the hunger!’. It didn’t out too great, actually, but the Taxxons jumped at the offer.”

 

“I think - No. Actually. I don’t see why, but. What’s this got to do with your Dad’s friend?”

 

“Well, they wound up on the Taxxon homeworld and morphed Taxxons at one point. Arbron got trapped. They left him there, later on. He was trapped as a Taxxon with no way out.”

 

“Wait they just - they just left him? His friend? They just left him on an enemy world with - with no one? Nothing?”

 

I blinked. “Yeah. I guess so. I mean, Elfangor didn’t make the decision. That was partly Arbron himself - the thinking was something like there’d be no place for him on the Andalite homeworld, which, true, but Alloran was in command. And Alloran was already a war-criminal at that point, by all standards.”

 

“Wait. You’re telling me that a war criminal was in charge of cadets? What the hell kind of military is that?”

 

“I - uh - huh. The Andalite one in the pre-Earth period of the Yeerk War, I guess? I mean, look, Mar has good reasons for disliking them in general. Alloran wasn’t entirely a bad guy when we met him later.”

 

“You met him later.”

 

“Yeah. When we got the Visser out of his head - he had become Esplin’s host right after that incident. Elfangor was there.”

 

Tony finally took his own drink and drained it.

 

“That’s pretty fucked up,” he said. “I’m pretty sure that if it were one of us, even, much less some kid in training, none of us would let him or her get left behind. For one thing, Cap wouldn’t stand for it.”

 

“I guess so,” I shrugged. “I don’t know what happened to Arbron. He probably died on the Taxxon homeworld. But sometimes I think about him, trapped. And making the decision to stay anyway. There was some rumor about Taxxon rebels, all throughout the war, that never quite went away. I like to think he was with them,” I finished my drink. “Sometimes I think he’s the bravest person I know of that I’ve never met.”

 

“Hmm,” Tony said. “So. Taxxons. Ask about Arbron. They talk?”

 

“What?”

 

“Obviously, if we meet Taxxons, we need to ask about this guy. Do they talk?” he repeated like I was a kindergardener.

 

“Um. Yeah, but nothing we figured out. It’s all hisses, y’know? I guess you could ask SHIELD for recorded samples or something if you wanted to figure it out.”

 

“Right. Well. Good chat,” Tony patted my shoulder as he walked away to his workshop.

  
I sat there, a little dumbfounded, and stared at my drink.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not going to usually do end notes on these, but I think this one deserves it, because something important happened here. A friend on tumblr prompted me "Hey, what happened to Arbron in your universe?" and it quickly became "Tony and Clintobias talk about their Dads, oops, remember this was supposed to be about Arbron?"
> 
> So I was like, shit, I have to fix this, and it turned into Clint telling Tony the story of Arbron, Andalite cadet, trapped in Taxxon morph and left behind by an adult who was already a war criminal and yet was his superior officer.
> 
> And I felt this sudden ball of _rage_. From Tony. From Tony Stark, hearing this for the first time, and going "HOW THE FUCK DID SOMEONE THINK THIS WAS OKAY?!" and I wrote it and then sat a little stunned there. Because I grew up reading Animorphs, and I had more contextual clues as to their wider culture than Tony did, and their inner motivations, and how everyone involved - Arbron, Alloran, and Elfangor - genuinely thought this wasn't good but was the only thing to do in the situation. 
> 
> But Tony Stark comes at this from Iron Man's perspective, from an Avengers perspective, from an adult hero's perspective. And that says that you don't leave people behind. If it is at all possible, you don't leave people behind, especially children, especially those you are tasked with training.
> 
> And that's the moment when I realized that Andalite Military Culture was even MORE fucked up than I already thought.


End file.
